The Internet has enabled the delivery of electronic content to billions of people. Some entities maintain content delivery exchanges that allow different content providers to reach a wide online audience. There is a limit to the resources that are dedicated to each content delivery campaign that a content provider establishes with a content delivery exchange. It is imperative that a content delivery exchange not exceed the resource limit of any content delivery campaign. However, this imperative is difficult to implement due to constant changes in the rate of user interaction with the content and the delay between when those interactions occur and when data reporting those interactions are received and processed by the content delivery exchange. For example, a content delivery exchange may experience a large amount of online traffic that triggers presentation of content items during different parts of the day while, during other parts of the day, the content delivery exchange may experience a relatively low amount of such online activity. As another example, while many different remote users may be presented with a content item (of a content delivery campaign) through their respective computing devices, a subset of those remote users might select the content item minutes or hours later. The delay between presentation and selection makes it difficult to adequate control resource usage of the content delivery campaign.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.